Question

I want to find whether a string contains a forward slash using “grep” command. It is easy at the beginning, and I wrote the following script.

foo=someone/books
if [ `echo "$foo" | grep '/'` ]
then
    echo "has forward slash"
fi

however, the problem is in the corner, if I set the variable “foo” to the following string,

foo="someone/books in stack"

The above script will be failed since there is “space” in variable foo, when the command expands, the condition in if statement is as below.

grep '/' someone/books in stack

Because of “space”, the above “grep” command has too many arguments that is illegal. FYI, I try to solved this problem using case statement:

case $foo in
    */*)
        echo "has forward slash"
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac

However, I do not want to use case statement since it’s verbose. So how could I solved this problem using grep command or others?

Answer 1

You are not using the if-statement correctly. The command in the if-condition needs to be quoted so that it becomes a single string when expanded. Like this:

if [ "`echo "$foo" | grep '/'`" ]
then
    echo "has forward slash"
fi

Or even better is if you check the return code of grep in your if-condition:

if $(echo "$foo" | grep -q '/')
then
    echo "has forward slash"
fi

You can also do away with the grep and use this instead:

foo="someone/books in stack"
if [[ "$foo" == */* ]]
then
  echo "has forward slash"
fi